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more.’
    I had been expecting that. ‘Later – ’
    He glares at me. ‘Never. It is too much for her.’
    The Sister says, ‘Monsieur Devlin should talk to her again.’
    We both swivel to face her. Her expression is stern. ‘If Madeleine doesn’t know who she is, she needs to know before she dies. If she does know, then she should tell us.’

THE FIRST AFTERNOON
    I trudge out into the gritty air to talk to the pilot, a stocky man with a moustache wider than his chin. He leans into the shade of the walls, flirting half-heartedly with a thin dark woman who oozes away when she sees me, her strangely marked heels kicking up small puffs of dust.
    The pilot looks at me expectantly and taps his watch, a cheap stainless-steel knock-off. I tell him I have to stay the night. He breaks into a passionate speech about why we should leave immediately: a speech involving his family, his health, undisclosed tax reasons and the presence of too many amorous women barely contained by these puny crumbling walls.
    I stare at the shadow of the rotor blades cutting like a crucifix into the hard ground and feel the machine’s metal body pulsing with heat.
    The helicopter had been a mistake. I should have come by car, an old Jeep or trader’s truck. The time in Sicily turned me reckless. I should have kept my temper under control, been drabber, inconspicuous. My vanity made me wear my best suit – so she would wish she never left me. I should have worn jeans and a Hawaiian shirt; everyone thinks Australia is an outpost of America anyway. I should have been a walking cliché; clichés make people relax. They stop asking questions. They assume they know.
    The pilot is trying to cross himself: he is a good sub-contractor and has learned gestures to please his Western clients, but his hands won’t stay straight and soon drift into the undulating gesture of the salaam.
    ‘May God be with you,’ I say sardonically; the Arabic equivalent of You’re fired . He deflates into a mumble.
    ‘Shut up, will you?’ I say. ‘I’m staying but you can go.’
    In my experience, people never mind rudeness if you are telling them what they want to hear. In their relief, they often reveal more than you ever expected.
    The pilot is no exception: the dark woman, he says, is called Meersun. She helped care for the woman after she was bitten.
    I feel better. Away from the sick bay, the office, in fact away from everything inside the Asylum, I feel clearer, more in control. Energy surges back through me. One way or another, I will get results. I always do.
    I am confident enough to take my first good look at the countryside. I see desolation. The fierce light bleaches the red sands into baked tan, a granite world. The sky faints into a leached blue, the sun reduced to pale yolk by its own brightness.
    Lethargic clouds ridge the sky like a half-opened shell. The only sound is the wind’s breath, turning ragged now. Maybe there is the echo of far-off dogs. But that could be my imagination. I have developed a distaste for dogs ever since Sicily.
    The Asylum’s road is just gravel overlaid on a scraping apart of the sand and rock. It falls down the hillside like an exhausted tongue, rolling out across the plain below, to the squat brown outcrop in the distance. The Kabir Massif.
    I take out my binoculars. Primordial rock gapes through the deep grooves left by the retreating ice. How ironic that for most of its forty-million-year history, the Sahara was a place of seas. That what turned Europe into a wintry hell for a millennia made the desert cool and lush and green. Rain for a thousand years – until the dry spells became longer and longer. No wonder everyone in the desert talked in terms of water: a sea of sand, waves of dunes. A form of nostalgia, of dreaming.
    I scan. The land is folded and squeezed into the distance. The heat haze makes the plain shimmer; the lonely road trembles. It doesn’t matter how much I adjust the binoculars’ lenses: the tough